Jurado hid with his 88-year-old mother between toy machines at the entrance of the Cielo Vista Walmart.
Lying in broken glass, he listened as the sound of gunshots grew closer. Then the man with the AK-47 was only 10 feet away.
“That day, I believe I stared death in the eyes,” Jurado, 53, said.
But the shooter left after his attention was drawn to a moving vehicle outside the store, and Jurado and his mother survived.
Jurado spent the next few hours helping victims in the Aug. 3 mass shooting and giving statements to police. Later that evening, he sat down, popped open a beer and flipped on the news: The gunman had allegedly driven more than 600 miles across the state from North Texas to target Hispanics in the border community.
The fear and adrenaline he felt throughout the day turned to anger. He’d been a target of the deadliest attack against Latinos in recent U.S. history.
“I think we all were, because of the color of our skin,” Jurado said.
Twenty-three people were killed in the shooting. The man charged in the attack allegedly wrote a 2,356-word white supremacist rant before the shooting and posted it to the online message board 8chan, which carries a reputation for being a breeding ground for white supremacy.
